Liberals are well served by the Conservative Party

Which political party in Britain should you vote for if you are a liberal? Especially after the last week, it seems the Conservative Party is your best choice. The Conservative Chancellor announced a radical policy in the Budget that retirees will now have greater freedom on how they take their pension, liberated from being shackled to a pitiful annuity. Labour, bewildered, is still working out whether it supports this policy, whether it can trust people to manage their money properly.

The Conservatives also press ahead with the progressive raising of the personal tax allowance, which Lord Saatchi has campaigned for for over a decade, to lift millions of low-paid workers out of tax. And this Saturday, thousands of same-sex couples will be celebrating, as they now have the right to marry thanks to legislation introduced by this Conservative-led government.

These are just a handful of examples of the granting of greater power and responsibility to individuals and institutions to shape their own destiny, the essence of liberalism. In recent years, the Conservatives have advocated several liberal policies: a referendum on membership of the EU, giving headteachers more say on who they recruit and how much they pay, allowing nurseries the flexibility to prioritise quality over quantity of staff, and enabling a wider range of organisations – including private and voluntary ones - to tender for the delivery of services including in the NHS. But both the Liberal Democrats and Labour have opposed all of these.

This is not mere cross-dressing or some tectonic political shift. The Conservative Party has in fact had a long-term relationship with liberalism: economic, social and political. Lord Liverpool’s administration in the 1820s pursued ambitious economic liberal reforms: custom duties were relaxed, monopolies limited and restrictions on exports abandoned, an agenda that cumulated in the repeal of the Corn Laws under Sir Robert Peel in 1846. Slavery was abolished by the Tory William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury introduced the Factory Acts, granting basic rights to workers in tough conditions. Under the premiership of Benjamin Disraeli, the vote was extended to millions of skilled working class men. In 1928, the Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin passed legislation that gave all women the vote.

For most of the 20th century, Conservatives became the champions of freedom as socialism advanced and the old Liberal Party declined. In fact, some factions from the latter gradually merged with the Conservatives. Until 1968, the National Liberal Party allied with Tories at a constituency level, with joint candidates such as Michael Heseltine. The Liberal Unionist Party, a break-away group that opposed Irish Home Rule, was first in a coalition with the Tories, then their leader Joseph Chamberlain finally agreed to join the Conservatives formally in 1912. Nick Clegg talks very rarely, and only briefly, about Chamberlain; touchy subject, seemingly.

Now, it is of course true that all three main political parties have liberals in their ranks and leadership team. British policymaking has been greatly enriched as a result of this sprawl. But political parties are coalitions themselves: liberals have to negotiate with others in their party who have different philosophical affiliations, and they may find themselves on the losing side in the internal battles over policy and vision. This seems to be happening too often in the Liberal Democrats and Labour at the moment.

Big challenges confront us: an ageing population, climate change and a race with emerging economies to produce highly skilled workforces. The pressures on the state will be unsustainably high, particularly when Britain has to remain a low-tax, competitive economy. We will need a strong dosage of economically liberal ideas to meet these challenges: for example, alternative ways of financing crucial public services such as education and healthcare, including greater contestability in commissioning, loans-based financing and social investment. The Tories to date have been most engaged and enthusiastic about these sort of ideas. Only they, at the moment, seem to have the appetite to pursue the economic liberal agenda we desperately need in the decades ahead.

Yes, liberals in the Conservative Party have to fight their own battles. And their liberalism must be tempered too by conservatism, a philosophy that rightly roots individuals in relationships and social custom. On some policy areas, liberal conservatives have lost: on immigration, for instance, where the party pursues a UKIP-lite message, all caps and clampdowns, endangering national and cultural enrichment.

Liberals are well served by the Conservative Party. For the moment. The liberal parliamentarians, policymakers and activists within it must keep fighting. For a brighter future for the Conservatives lies not in being a refuge for those angry and disappointed with change, but as a home for hopeful younger generations who increasingly identify as liberals.

Ryan Shorthouse is the Director of Bright Blue, a think tank for liberal conservativism

The Brexit Beartraps, #2: Could dropping out of the open skies agreement cancel your holiday?

So what is it this time, eh? Brexit is going to wipe out every banana planet on the entire planet? Brexit will get the Last Night of the Proms cancelled? Brexit will bring about World War Three?

To be honest, I think we’re pretty well covered already on that last score, but no, this week it’s nothing so terrifying. It’s just that Brexit might get your holiday cancelled.

What are you blithering about now?

Well, only if you want to holiday in Europe, I suppose. If you’re going to Blackpool you’ll be fine. Or Pakistan, according to some people...

You’re making this up.

I’m honestly not, though we can’t entirely rule out the possibility somebody is. Last month Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair boss who attracts headlines the way certain other things attract flies, warned that, “There is a real prospect... that there are going to be no flights between the UK and Europe for a period of weeks, months beyond March 2019... We will be cancelling people’s holidays for summer of 2019.”

He’s just trying to block Brexit, the bloody saboteur.

Well, yes, he’s been quite explicit about that, and says we should just ignore the referendum result. Honestly, he’s so Remainiac he makes me look like Dan Hannan.

But he’s not wrong that there are issues: please fasten your seatbelt, and brace yourself for some turbulence.

Not so long ago, aviation was a very national sort of a business: many of the big airports were owned by nation states, and the airline industry was dominated by the state-backed national flag carriers (British Airways, Air France and so on). Since governments set airline regulations too, that meant those airlines were given all sorts of competitive advantages in their own country, and pretty much everyone faced barriers to entry in others.

The EU changed all that. Since 1994, the European Single Aviation Market (ESAM) has allowed free movement of people and cargo; established common rules over safety, security, the environment and so on; and ensured fair competition between European airlines. It also means that an AOC – an Air Operator Certificate, the bit of paper an airline needs to fly – from any European country would be enough to operate in all of them.

Do we really need all these acronyms?

No, alas, we need more of them. There’s also ECAA, the European Common Aviation Area – that’s the area ESAM covers; basically, ESAM is the aviation bit of the single market, and ECAA the aviation bit of the European Economic Area, or EEA. Then there’s ESAA, the European Aviation Safety Agency, which regulates, well, you can probably guess what it regulates to be honest.

All this may sound a bit dry-

It is.

-it is a bit dry, yes. But it’s also the thing that made it much easier to travel around Europe. It made the European aviation industry much more competitive, which is where the whole cheap flights thing came from.

In a speech last December, Andrew Haines, the boss of Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority said that, since 2000, the number of destinations served from UK airports has doubled; since 1993, fares have dropped by a third. Which is brilliant.

Brexit, though, means we’re probably going to have to pull out of these arrangements.

Stop talking Britain down.

Don’t tell me, tell Brexit secretary David Davis. To monitor and enforce all these international agreements, you need an international court system. That’s the European Court of Justice, which ministers have repeatedly made clear that we’re leaving.

So: last March, when Davis was asked by a select committee whether the open skies system would persist, he replied: “One would presume that would not apply to us” – although he promised he’d fight for a successor, which is very reassuring.

We can always holiday elsewhere.

Perhaps you can – O’Leary also claimed (I’m still not making this up) that a senior Brexit minister had told him that lost European airline traffic could be made up for through a bilateral agreement with Pakistan. Which seems a bit optimistic to me, but what do I know.

Intercontinental flights are still likely to be more difficult, though. Since 2007, flights between Europe and the US have operated under a separate open skies agreement, and leaving the EU means we’re we’re about to fall out of that, too.

Surely we’ll just revert to whatever rules there were before.

Apparently not. Airlines for America – a trade body for... well, you can probably guess that, too – has pointed out that, if we do, there are no historic rules to fall back on: there’s no aviation equivalent of the WTO.

The claim that flights are going to just stop is definitely a worst case scenario: in practice, we can probably negotiate a bunch of new agreements. But we’re already negotiating a lot of other things, and we’re on a deadline, so we’re tight for time.

In fact, we’re really tight for time. Airlines for America has also argued that – because so many tickets are sold a year or more in advance – airlines really need a new deal in place by March 2018, if they’re to have faith they can keep flying. So it’s asking for aviation to be prioritised in negotiations.

The only problem is, we can’t negotiate anything else until the EU decides we’ve made enough progress on the divorce bill and the rights of EU nationals. And the clock’s ticking.

This is just remoaning. Brexit will set us free.

A little bit, maybe. CAA’s Haines has also said he believes “talk of significant retrenchment is very much over-stated, and Brexit offers potential opportunities in other areas”. Falling out of Europe means falling out of European ownership rules, so itcould bring foreign capital into the UK aviation industry (assuming anyone still wants to invest, of course). It would also mean more flexibility on “slot rules”, by which airports have to hand out landing times, and which are I gather a source of some contention at the moment.

But Haines also pointed out that the UK has been one of the most influential contributors to European aviation regulations: leaving the European system will mean we lose that influence. And let’s not forget that it was European law that gave passengers the right to redress when things go wrong: if you’ve ever had a refund after long delays, you’ve got the EU to thank.

So: the planes may not stop flying. But the UK will have less influence over the future of aviation; passengers might have fewer consumer rights; and while it’s not clear that Brexit will mean vastly fewer flights, it’s hard to see how it will mean more, so between that and the slide in sterling, prices are likely to rise, too.

It’s not that Brexit is inevitably going to mean disaster. It’s just that it’ll take a lot of effort for very little obvious reward. Which is becoming something of a theme.

Still, we’ll be free of those bureaucrats at the ECJ, won’t be?

This’ll be a great comfort when we’re all holidaying in Grimsby.

Jonn Elledge edits the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric, and writes for the NS about subjects including politics, history and Brexit. You can find him on Twitter or Facebook.